Epstein first met Einstein at a refugee camp near Cromer in Norfolk in 1933, following his flight from the Nazis that year. A week of sittings was quickly arranged, 'Einstein appeared dressed very comfortably in a pullover with his wild hair floating in the wind. His glance contained a mixture of the humane, the humorous, and the profound. This was a combination which delighted me. He resembled the ageing Rembrandt.

The sittings took placed in a small hut, which was filled with a piano, and I could hardly turn round. I asked the girl attendants, of whom there were several, ... to remove the door, which they did; but they facetiously asked whether I would like the roof off next. I thought I should have liked that too, but I did not demand it, as the attendant 'angels' seemed to resent a little my intrusion into the retreat of their Professor. After the third day they thawed and I was offered beer at the end of the sitting.

I worked for two hours every morning, and at the first sitting the Professor was so surrounded with tobacco smoke from his pipe that I saw nothing. At the second sitting I asked him to smoke in the interval.
Einstein's manner was full of charm and bonhomie.

At the end of the sittings he would sit down at the piano and play, and once he took a violin and went outside and scraped away. He looked altogether like a wandering gypsy.

Einstein watched my work with a kind of näive wonder, and seemed to sense that I was doing something good of him' (J. Epstein, loc. cit.)